


Burned Out

by notcoolenoughtobehere



Series: Frazel for Days [2]
Category: The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst, Baby Frank!, But it ends happy!, Dead mom angst, F/M, Frank through the ages, Hazel is technically dead for a bit of this, It's a happy ending kiddos, My poor Frank, Semi-accidental self-harm, Soul Scars, frazel - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-25
Updated: 2018-07-25
Packaged: 2019-06-14 20:53:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15397227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notcoolenoughtobehere/pseuds/notcoolenoughtobehere
Summary: When Frank was born, he had burns all over his body.Soulmate AU - soulmates get each other's scars.





	1. Part 1

**Author's Note:**

> All the regular rules of HoO apply, just with soulmates added. This ended up so much longer than I intended i can only apologize

When Emily Zhang gave birth to a beautiful, while large, baby, the first thing she noticed was not the obscene amount of dark hair that cupped his small head. She did not first notice the way his tiny, chunky hands stretched upward like he was reaching for an invisible hand, or the way he blinked twice when refocusing his nearly black, angled eyes, or even how one of his ears poked out drastically more than the other, making him look like a constantly confused elephant with satellites attached to his head. 

The first thing Emily Zhang noticed about her beautiful, while large, baby, was the burn marks that covered him from temple to toe. 

After a series of medical tests, the doctors confirmed to an anxious Emily and Grandma Zhang that, while large, there was not anything technically wrong with her son - in fact, the scars seemed distinctly similar to soul scars. It wasn't unusual for a baby to be born with soul scars; any child with an older soulmate is typically born with at least a few. Upon saying this, the doctor looked at Emily Zhang, and she remembered the shrapnel pockmarks that stretched across her face that had appeared a few months after Mars had left. So, she stuck out her chin, proud, and she and Grandma Zhang left the hospital with their perfectly healthy, while large, scarred baby. 

Frank was terrified of fire. Even the gas stove that would warm Grandma Zhang's water for tea sent him at least three feet away until he was ten years old, and, to this day, the familiar whoosh of the igniting flames still warranted a hesitant step back.

Frank was three years old when he recognized that something about him was very, very different. He held his mother's hand and examined it closely, comparing it with his until he came up with the unavoidable conclusion;

"Momma, what's wrong with me?"

Emily Zhang paused momentarily, hand poised to turn the page in her book. She turned to him and curled her hand around his. "What do you mean, Frank?"

"My face and hands are all squiggly and red and nobody else looks like that. Not you or Grandma." 

Emily smiled down at him. "Well, you are special, Little Elephant. Your soulmate left their mark all over your body so you would be able to tell who they are right away." She ran a hand through his dark hair and took a breath. She told him all about soulmates, people that are specially made for each other, with matching scars and all. 

Frank tilted his head, perturbed. He looked at his small palms and traced the ridges of his scars. 

"Momma. What happened to my soulmate to give them these?" He looked at her with wide, scared eyes, and leaned in like he was whispering a secret, "Do you think it hurt?"

The piece of firewood that represented her son's life grew heavier in her pocket as Emily Zhang looked at the obvious burn scars that outlined his face. 

That night, Frank had a nightmare of a starry summer night. The crickets chirped in the warm residue of the sun. Frank was standing on a sea of fire, flames licking up his legs. The flames clawed outward, crushing trees like toothpicks and swallowing the night sky in a fury of uncontrolled rage. 

By the time Frank was nine, he knew he didn't have a lot going for him. He was a chubby, Asian, babyfaced nerd that had been the butt of jokes for years. On the first day of kindergarten, Frank was doing well with some of his classmates until one girl saw him and started crying, later telling her parents that a demon tried to hurt her in class. At nine years old, Frank's reputation wasn't much better. 

A few fifth graders had discovered Frank's fear of fire. During recess, while Frank sat in his designated recess corner in the shadows counting his mythomagic cards, they approached him. 

Frank stood, gathering his cards clumsily, and tried to sneak around the group of impending doom, even though he was almost as tall as they were, but as he swerved around them, the tallest held out a small, glowing stick, right in front of Frank's face. 

Frank shriveled back as the lit match nearly grazed his forehead. He could feel the heat of the flame across his brow, sharp and stinging. As Frank gasped, the boy laughed. He circled Frank, dropping the almost-devoured match stick onto Frank's shoe. His cronies giggled while Frank kicked his foot desperately, sending the match onto the concrete where it fizzled out. 

Someone else in the group lit another match. Frank looked at the small light, terrified. The fifth grader held out the match menacingly, and Frank glanced around for something, anything, please, some way out of this corner and the fire and - 

Frank closed his eyes, prepared for the flame.

"Boys!" Luckily, a teacher swung by. Frank felt so relieved he nearly hugged her. The boys were suspended for a week for having matches at school and Frank got to go home early that day. 

The teasing had mostly stopped by the time Frank was thirteen. He was still bullied for his face and garrish, disproportionate body that lumbered around clumsily and broke things accidentally - but few mentioned his scars. Frank liked to think that maybe the fire jokes just got boring, or they ran out of material, but Frank knew better. It was the pity that made them stop, because at age thirteen everyone understands what soul scars are, and Frank might as well be parading the cadaver of his soulmate around on his shoulders. 

He imagined alternatives, while lying in his bed late at night. Perhaps his soulmate was a fireman that got burned in phases. Frank imagined them, running into a burning building to save a mother and her child, their hand coming too close to the flames. The next month, they were saving a man from a fire apartment and got caught under a burning ceiling beam, resulting in the burns found on both of their backs. Frank imagined that his soulmate got help and got better and was still alive, waiting to meet Frank anxiously and worrying over the few scars Frank had contributed (consisting of a thin white line on the bottom of his heel from stepping on some broken glass and a small dent in the back of his head from falling out of a tree).

Or, maybe his soulmate got burned in boiling water from a freak accident and had gotten to the hospital fast enough to be saved. Or, got caught in a sandstorm in 130° weather, or was rescued from a vat of hot oil, or miraculously healed from an explosion. 

But Frank knew that there was no way his soulmate was any of these things for an inescapable reason; since he was born, absolutely zero new soul scars had appeared. In thirteen years, his soulmate had never gotten a single scar - the odds of which were so incredibly unlikely that the very thought of it brought tears to Frank's eyes. To avoid getting scars for thirteen years, you'd have to be in a grave.

But the sun rose the next day, so Frank continued hoping.

He used to trace the planes of his distorted face, wondering whose story they told. His grandma would look on, disapproving.

"Fai, you won't find your soulmate there. Think of how many times you've already checked." 

To this, Emily would laugh quietly and help Frank find the designs hidden in his scars, like an almost-bird in flight on the side of his neck and a miniature death star above his left eyebrow, and, Frank's favorite, a warped bear claw on his lower chin. Frank imagined that, wherever they were, his soulmate noticed these designs, too. Frank had a strange sense their favorite would be the flowers on their ankles. 

Frank was fifteen when his mother left to the military. Needless to say, it was not a good day for him. He had gone upstairs to his bedroom and sat on his bed. The light coming in from his window was a cool blue that illuminated the dust motes into fireflies.

Mom was gone. Frank looked at his twisted flesh and he imagined again what must have happened to his soulmate for their body to be devoured and scorched and torn apart, and, looking at the scars, the purple and red swirls that marred his entire body, Frank knew that, whatever it was, his soulmate did not survive it. Frank was more sure in this moment than he had ever been before that his soulmate's scars were the only thing living about them. 

Frank had hated his scars before - resented the way it made people look at him, wincing in sympathy, the target they painted on his back as a weirdo, an outcast - but he had never loathed them until that moment. They controlled his body, dominated his life, and, worst of all, the violent burn marks that stared back at him in the mirror meant his soulmate was dead. Frank was alone, and these scars roared that out and Frank hated them. He hated them, he hated them, he hated himself for always being the one that things didn't work out for, for having to be the son of a war hero and the soulmate of a burned corpse. For always ending up alone.

The twisted face on the back of his palm almost seemed to scream, and panic closed a fist around Frank's throat and everything, everything, everything was too much. Fire flashed, hot and red and burning, in Frank's vision. He could see the flames, feel them as they burned up his body as they must have burned his soulmate, and Frank clawed desperately at his arms, ripping away the imaginary fire that danced across his skin. 

When his grandmother found him an hour later, tears trickling down his scarred face, hyperventilating into his bleeding arms, she untangled him silently, brought his downstairs, and bandaged his wounds. Her face was set like a statue, immovable and unemotional. 

"She won't come back," Frank whispered as his grandmother finished her repairs. His voice was broken and scratchy and tired.

She didn't respond. 

"Do you think my soulmate is dead?" He asked. His own anger surprised him.

His grandmother looked at him with a kind of fire in her eyes, her lips tight and trembling. "Fai, if you mourn the corpse of a stranger, your entire life will be wasted at the grave. Zhang descendants have always lived hard lives filled with pain. Soulmate or no, you have strong blood in your veins. You are like your mother - a fighter. Now, act like it, silly ox." 

Well, that made Frank feel better. He looked at his bandaged arms miserably as his grandmother walked away. If Zhang descendants have always lived hard lives filled with pain, Frank wanted a refund.

\--

Two months later, Frank woke up to discover his body clear of every burn.


	2. Part 2

Through Frank's groggy vision, he faintly recognized something strange in the way his skin moved over his bones, a difference in the pull of his arms as he lifted a hand through his buzzed hair, but he didn't understand the drastic measures of the change until he blinked at himself in his bathroom mirror.

Adrenaline jammed through Frank's veins, slamming him into a very, very awake panic.

His face was pale and smooth, no sign of a half-bird on his neck or a death star above his eyebrow or a bear claw on his chin. His hands, though worn and calloused on his fingertips and palms where he notched arrows in his bow, were void of any twisted designs. His face structure was so altered it was difficult to associate this new, babyfaced kid that watched him from the mirror with the old babyfaced kid that watched him from the mirror yesterday. His nose looked straighter, free of the twisted sinew that used to string his nostrils to the left, and when his mouth parted in surprise, Frank noticed the absence of a pull against his lips that used to mangle his expression into a grimace.

He placed a smooth hand over the planes of his face, wondering whose story they told.

What was this supposed to mean?

\--

After his mother died, Frank went outside to decimate his grandmother's china, bow and arrow in hand. 

He envisioned his mother, smiling and kissing his hairline before she left. Thwak! A teacup shattered.

His mother peeked over his shoulder as he stared in the mirror, Frank's broad shoulders already above hers at age thirteen. She was laughing, pulling him down to kiss him on the cheek. 

A vase splintered as Frank's arrow grazed its side. 

He saw himself, two weeks ago, staring at his scar-less face for the first time in his life, confusion and panic and a maligned hope in his eyes. 

Frank hit the center of a teapot and watched the painted porcelain explode. 

Had his soulmate been alive Frank's whole life and was now dead? Was Frank a victim of some sort of cosmic joke - was Frank a cosmic joke himself? 

Perhaps Frank did something terrible in a previous life. His punishment was a clunky, disproportionate body, a dead mother, and soul scars that would haunt him long enough that he would almost miss them when they left him bare and confused.

Frank imagined fire enveloping his soulmate, leaving the twisting patterns that Frank had come to know so well. Soul scars didn't just go away, even after a soulmate died. It was infuriatingly, ridiculously nonsensical. 

His arrow missed his grandmother's second favorite plate by a long shot.

And then, of course, his grandmother arrived and thought it was a good time to mention that Roman gods existed and Frank had more reason to be afraid of fire than he thought and he was being kicked out to go live with wolves as a sixteenth birthday present. Great. The cosmic joke continued. 

\--

Hazel was . . . a little overwhelmed.

After drowning in a cave of boiling oil, sacrificing Elysium for her mother, and wandering in the fields of Asphodel for decades before her very pale half-brother pulled her aside, smuggled her past the death equivalence of the TSA, and shoved her into a very new and terrifying world, Hazel couldn't help but feel justified. 

Not to mention the soul scars. 

They had appeared as Nico brought Hazel back into existence, twirling seamlessly down her forearms. They were red and patchy, stretching from her elbow to two inches below her wrist. 

Hazel had stared at them in awe. She had never shown a sign of soul scars before.

For the first time in either of her lives, Hazel could hear the steady breathing of others around her. It was rhythmic and soft, a reassurance of the new family Hazel had been thrust into. The Fifth Cohort. She stared up at the ceiling, mindlessly mapped the ragged edges of the scars on her arms.

She had hoped that Sammy had been her soulmate, but after Sammy had shown her the scar he had on his shoulder from "spectacularly falling off of a tall fence," Hazel knew he couldn't be. She remembered seeing something swirling beneath his layers of dry humor and she wondered if he had hoped she was his soulmate, too. 

But as she stared at the scars on her forearms, Hazel knew that she had missed them. Her soulmate had come and gone, lived and died while Hazel was sitting under a poplar tree in the endless fields. Two barges sailing through fog, Hazel and her soulmate had lost each other in the darkness. She wondered how close she had come to meeting them, if there was a time when she could have stretched out her hand to them, fingertips grazing her future.

A bowling ball of sorrow and guilt crashed into Hazel's gut. Her soulmate probably died years ago, having lived their entire life looking for someone who was buried under a mountain of oil.

She traced the marred hills across her forearms, wondering whose story they told. 

Hazel hoped that they were happy.

The most severe scars were on her arms. Hazel hoped that meant her soulmate had died of old age and not that the arm wounds were bad enough that they had bled out. But then a strange thought slammed into her mind.

Oh, gods. Mortal wound scars. Hazel had died - really, truly died, dead. She visualized her soulmate going through an average morning when bam, suddenly, scars appeared on every inch of their body. She imagined the panic, the fear, the mind numbing anxiety, and, gods, they must have known. Known that their soulmate was dead. Hazel swallowed furious tears.

It wasn't fair. That Hazel had to die, that her soulmate had to know. That her mother had to be greedy and selfish and Hazel had to deal with it. That she, a scared thirteen year old girl, had to be the one to die so the rest of the world could live. 

If everything was like it should have been, Hazel would've met her soulmate in the grocery store or walking down the sidewalk or in school. They would know each other by the slice across their pinkies from a small slip while cutting an apple, or by the dent in their forehead from three stitches after a boating accident. Hazel and her soulmate would laugh together and be awkward and perfect. Maybe they would get married some day and Hazel would always have someone to come home to. Maybe they would have a kid and Hazel would do everything her mother couldn't. 

But nothing was as it should have been. Nothing at all. 

Of course, Hazel did not know that, as she laid restless at Camp Jupiter, Frank Zhang was very much on his way, which meant that there was something that was exactly as it should be. 

\--

By the time Frank arrived at Camp Jupiter, he still struggled to look at himself in the mirror. It was like a mocking game of copy cat, watching a different person follow Frank's movements. 

This new skin felt as foreign as the firewood bundled in Frank's coat pocket. 

A few days into his time at camp, Frank saw Hazel talking to a faun on the streets of New Rome. At first, Frank kept his head down, cautiously avoiding the accidental eye contact he dreaded. But then she leaned down, picking something up from the ground and exposing the full length of her arm.

It took Frank a moment to process. 

Her hair was painted gold at the tips. Her skin was dark and unmarked and unburned and smooth. She didn't stand taller than Frank's bicep.

She looked young, younger than Frank, maybe, which made no sense. She had no hint of a scar on her hands or face or neck, no bird or death star or bear claw, which made less sense. But as she sifted through her kinky curls, Frank saw a flash of her forearm again, and his heart shuddered. 

He examined his own, to be sure, but Frank recognized them well enough, even though he'd only had them for a few months. A few scratches along his arms, half-healed from his breakdown, replicated exactly on the forearms of the girl standing ten feet in front of him. 

And suddenly, Frank was running towards her, tripping over his clumsy feet and nearly falling face first onto the sidewalk and, wow, he wasn't really thinking exactly because normal Frank would prepare a speech beforehand and would never approach someone that looked as involved as his soulmate did, but in that moment, Frank thought the word soulmate. Soulmate, soulmate, alive and in the present and _right in front of him_. He could only hear his own rapid breath, the sound of his feet slapping on the pavement. The world around him blurred into a tunnel, pointing to her. 

Frank nearly ran her over. He pressed the breaks on his wheeling limbs, but he still stopped embarrassingly close to her, causing her to jump slightly. He stumbled backwards. 

And she turned and looked at him. Her eyes gleamed gold where the sun touched them, almost glowing. Each scar on her forearm matched up perfectly with his. 

If Frank's heart was the second hand tick of a clock, hours would have passed by the time Frank, through a fiery blush across his face, put out his arm hesitantly, clearly showing the identical scars shared between them. Breathless, he mumbled the most epic introductory soulmate line in existence, something that he would torment himself for weeks about. 

"Hi."


End file.
